Citizen

Angel Du$t, Oso Oso, pronoun

Thu, May 24, 2018

Doors: 6:00 pm / Show: 7:00 pm

Port City Music Hall

Portland, ME

$18 Advance / $21 Day of Show

This event is all ages

Buy tickets in person at the Port City Music Hall box office (504 Congress Street) Wednesday-Friday 10AM-5PM, charge by phone at 800-745-3000, or online right here. PCMH box office will open one hour before doors night of show.

Citizen’s As You Please reports from ground zero of an epidemic. Two years removed from their previous Run For Cover LP, Everybody Is Going To Heaven, Citizen’s perspective is far less sublime. As You Please is a confrontational record, incapable of turning a blind eye toward the inescapable strife. And so, songwriter Mat Kerekes pursues the source of discontent that is ravaging his friends, his family, and his Rust Belt city of Toledo, Ohio with the band’s most dynamic record to date.

On As You Please the epidemic is bigger than addiction and overdoses. There is no longer a Dream to be pursued for the friends and family surrounding Citizen. The band explores that absence and the misguided ways in which it gets filled. On opener “Jet” the kids move slow and there’s a stranger living in the narrator’s home. Both are Kerekes’ discreet way of expressing the wreckage of widespread opiate addiction. “In The Middle Of It All” might be Citizen at their most hopeful, but it also reads as agonizing expression of the ruin in the Heartland.

As You Please also showcases the growing versatility of a band seven years deep and still restless. Citizen has fully outgrown the pop punk, but also refuses to brood in post-hardcore dirges. Written over the course of a year, the record is devoid of the brutish and sinister elements found on Everybody Is Going To Heaven. Here, Citizen go beyond the grunge to shoegaze contrasts and strive for something benevolent.

There’s a spiritual core to the record that manifests in subtle ways like the ethereal vocals echoing in the breakdown of “Control,” the droning organs on “You Are A Star” or the almost operatic refrain on “In The Middle Of It All.” The finespun ways in which Citizen has written this record mark a cataclysmic breakthrough for the band. There is damage and disarray in the band member’s daily lives, but within this record all the pieces have been restored in an ornate arrangement befitting a stained glass mosaic.

In the end, As You Please tries to give strength to those in need. There are illitic factors that control, but Citizen has written a guiding light of an album out of the debris. It concludes with “You Are A Star” and “Flowerchild;” one an unstable request of confidence set to soaring progressions, the other a blistering finale that subverts expectation. As You Please might read as meek, but it represents Citizen in its most confident and expansive state.

Angel Du$t is an American hardcore punk band from Baltimore, Maryland, formed in 2012. It all started with their first EP, Xtra Raw, a collection of 8 songs that managed to be as catchy as they were explosively energetic. Traces of influence from bands like Bad Brains, The Stooges, Poison Idea, Black Flag, and Misfits are apparent, yet Angel Du$tmanages to contribute something truly unique that could have only come out of Baltimore. Even with influences that seem to draw deep into the '80s and earlier, Angel Du$t finds a way to approach it all with a youthful honesty, with songs that touch on everything from the personal to the sexual to the socio-political. Their first full length, A.D., is due for release June 10th on REACT! Records / Reaper Records; 12 tracks recorded with Brian McTernan (The Explosion, In My Eyes, Polar Bear Club) that blur the lines between punk, hardcore, rock, and pop.

Oso Oso is a music project that started out of Long Beach, New York in 2015. Recently, they released "the yunahon mixtape". I think someone from Spin said something cool about it? Somebody from Pitchfork definitely did, I remember that, that was cool. You should give it a listen. Jade worked hard on it.

"It's a heartbroken girl in her shitty apartment in Brooklyn," Alyse Vellturo, aka pronoun, says of her Rhyme & Reason debut There's no one new around you. Recorded in solitude in a cramped corner of the artist's bedroom, the four-song EP is both personally charged and sonically inventive, matching richly layered guitar textures and insistent lo-fi beats with vivid, uncompromisingly personal lyrics.

"It was literally just me in the corner with my little computer, recording guitar through a tiny practice amp through the headphone jack," she explains. "Every night after work I’d go home, buy a six pack, and sit at my computer with my electric guitar. Once I felt the song had its bones I would go have a cigarette in my backyard, write a verse, go in and record the verse, go out for another cigarette, write a second verse, etc. All the verses are written in about three minutes."

The Boston native and self-confessed emo kid began playing guitar and recording her own compositions in her early teens. While studying at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music, she gained technical experience producing and engineering friends' recording projects and turning her attention towards the business side of the music industry. In 2012, she moved to Brooklyn to take a music-biz job, putting her own creative efforts on temporary hold. Eventually, she felt the urge to write and record music again, and her renewed creative spark gained additional momentum in December 2015, when a three- year relationship abruptly ended.

"I started to write songs and record again, but I didn't have much to write about," she recalls. "Then we broke up, and it all came pouring out. The tracks on this EP are all from that period. The whole thing was done in three or four weeks, every night after work. It was an instinctive process, and it kind of grew on its own."

Vellturo adopted the performing pseudonym of pronoun, in acknowledgement of her status as a one-person band. "I want to keep it that way, at least for now," she says. "This music is so personal to me, and it's kind of hard to do that with other people. I have done some gigs with a drummer, a bass player and a guitarist, and I have a vocal pedal that does harmonies with me, so it kind of sounds like the record.
"pronoun is almost like another persona, someone that says and words things in a way I never would," Vellturo concludes.

"I don't usually express my emotions outwardly. Sometimes a song will come together in a few hours in my apartment, and I'll wake up the next morning and listen to it and think 'How did I write that?,' because I wasn't aware that I was thinking that. So pronoun is something that I'd like to keep exploring for awhile."